‘We’ve done fine without you so far, brother,’ Ahmed commented. It was a low blow. Shazad and I shared a look. This new tension that hung between Ahmed and Jin wasn’t good for anyone.
But Jin didn’t say anything as he brushed past me on his way to the door, fingers dancing across the back of my hand like he wanted to take it. ‘Don’t volunteer for anything stupid while I’m gone.’
‘We don’t have that many other choices that I can see,’ Imin said as the door closed behind Jin. ‘Unless someone else would like to reveal now that they’ve been sitting on a secret shapeshifting skill so I can take a break. Anyone? No? I didn’t think so.’
‘I’d offer, but I don’t think foreigners are all that welcome in the palace at the moment,’ Sam offered. He was watching Shazad. ‘And I don’t make a beautiful enough woman to pass in the harem very long. Amani can vouch for that.’
‘It’s true,’ I admitted. ‘He doesn’t have the cleavage to pull off a khalat.’ Shazad snorted.
‘Someone has to go,’ Imin said, uncurling herself from her husband’s grip, shifting easily from wife to rebel. ‘If I get caught I can always take poison before he gets his claws into me like he did Amani.’ I wasn’t entirely sure she was joking.
We stole a few hours of sleep after daybreak, when we were sure the palace was done feeding lies to the people and the rush of the night before had worn off. We were in Shazad’s home, which meant she had her own rooms inside the house. That was the moment it hit me in earnest that our old home was gone. Our tent was gone. The small space that we had shared for half a year and that had become as familiar as my bed in Dustwalk had ever been.
I figured I could’ve found my own tent. If I’d wanted to. Start getting settled into this new camp. Instead, I found Jin. He was dozing in the shade of an orange tree with huge, sprawling branches. His shirt was riding up and I could see the place Hadjara had patched him up. He startled awake as I stretched out next to him, stilling as he realised it was me. I knew he was watching me. In the scarce few months we’d had between Fahali and the bullet that caught me in the side, we’d stolen plenty of moments together in the desert but never slept side by side. He shifted slightly so he was on his side facing me as I settled down, pillowing my head with my arm. The grass was still cool from the night. I might be sleeping on the ground again, but I had the feeling I would rest easier here than I had on a hundred cushions in the harem. ‘I haven’t gotten around to setting up a new tent yet.’ His arm found the small of my back. ‘Seeing as I only just got back from chasing down this girl I know.’
‘Next time you should try to keep better track of her,’ I said as I closed my eyes, leaning my head into him.
‘I’m counting on it.’ He settled me against him. That was the last thing I heard before I dozed off.
Shazad woke us both sometime in the afternoon; her hair was wet from a bath and twisted up into a knot at the back of her head. I wondered if she’d had any real rest since Auranzeb. Leyla had finally come to, she told us.
Shazad had made good on her promise of chains. Tamid and Leyla had been confined to two of the many empty rooms in the house, chained and locked until we could count on them not making a run for it. I’d tried to go see Tamid in the room adjoining Leyla’s, but he’d pretended to be sleeping, which was a clear enough message for me.
Leyla looked like a trapped animal, her knees pulled up to her chin, eyes darting between me, Jin, Ahmed, and Shazad, like she was trying to watch us all at once.
No. Not a trapped animal. She was looking at us like we might be the animals. About to tear her apart at any second. I remembered the day I met her, in the menagerie. When she’d been building a small mechanical elephant and I’d been the one being circled by Kadir’s wives. But this was different. At least I figured it was.
‘So,’ Ahmed said conversationally, sitting down at the end of the bed. She drew her legs in a bit further. ‘You built an army of machine and magic for my father.’
‘I didn’t—’ Leyla had always sounded young, but her small voice was almost gone now. ‘Please, don’t hurt me. I didn’t have a choice in helping him.’
‘Nobody’s going to hurt you,’ Ahmed said gently at the same time that Shazad made a disbelieving noise at the back of her throat.
‘Everyone has a choice,’ Shazad said when Leyla looked at her with wide, startled eyes. I kicked her ankle. Hard. The last thing we needed was to scare Leyla too badly to talk. She looked at me sharply.
‘My choice was to help my father or watch my brother die.’ Leyla buried her face in her chained-up hands miserably. ‘What would you have done?’ And then she started to cry. Out of nowhere, big ugly sobs that shook her whole body violently.
‘Your father threatened Rahim?’ I asked, instead of letting Shazad answer that question. ‘He told you he would hurt him if you didn’t help him?’ Rahim had been worried about Leyla being in danger in the harem, but it looked like he was the one being threatened.
‘Rahim has no idea. He never knew what happened to our mother.’ Leyla wiped at her running nose with her sleeve as best she could with tied hands. ‘All those years back. She told my father she could make him a machine that could power all of Miraji. That could change the world.’ Her mother had been the daughter of a Gamanix engineer. The country that melded magic and machines. ‘And she did it. Except that it needed to take its energy from somewhere. It took it from her.’ Leyla wiped angrily at the tears welling in her eyes. ‘Just like it did for all the other people who came after her.’
‘Like Sayyida,’ I realised. ‘And Ayet.’ And Mouhna and Uzma. Girls who had disappeared out of the harem without a trace. A place where girls disappeared all the time without causing any ripples.
‘They were tests. You can take—’ Leyla squeezed her eyes shut. ‘The Holy Books say that mortals are made with a spark of Djinni fire. The machine takes that spark and can give life to something else. Not true life, but – what they have. My father figured if he could do that with a mortal life, what could be done with an immortal one?’ Leyla looked pained.
‘You can power an army that doesn’t fall when faced with bullets,’ Shazad filled in, understanding what it was we’d all seen the night before. The gravity of what we were facing moved between the four of us. ‘That doesn’t tire or eat. That can stand against Miraji’s enemies.’
‘Including us,’ I said, grimly. ‘How do they work?’
Leyla shrugged, looking miserable. ‘The same way all magic does. Words, words, words.’
‘So how do we stop them?’ Shazad interrupted before Leyla could tumble down some rabbit hole of self-pity.
‘It’s almost impossible.’ Leyla shook her head, tears squeezing out of her eyes. ‘You’d have to destroy the power source and—’
‘The machine,’ Jin said. He took a step forward and Leyla flinched away from him. I put a hand on his arm, stopping him. He might technically share the same blood as Leyla, but he was a dangerous-looking tattooed stranger to her, not a brother.
‘How do we do that?’ Shazad asked. ‘We’ve got enough gunpowder to blow the whole thing if we can—’
‘No,’ Leyla said hurriedly, her eyes wide and panicked. ‘You’d destroy the whole city!’ Like in the story of Akim and his wife. Djinni fire out of control. ‘The Djinni has to be released, not unleashed. The energy released with the right words. Same as he was captured with.’ Then Leyla looked straight at me. ‘Amani bound him. She’s the only one who can unbind him.’
And just like that, everyone was looking at me. If I’d known I was doomed to get this much attention I might’ve brushed my hair.
Chapter 41